For days, Speaker Mike Johnson had called and texted Senator Lindsey Graham, imploring him to wait for the House to take the lead in the legislative drive to enact President Trump’s sweeping tax, budget and immigration agenda.
When the three men converged in New Orleans on Sunday in the president’s suite at the Super Bowl, Mr. Graham shut him down in person.
“I’m a huge fan, and nothing would please me more than one big, beautiful bill passing the House,” Mr. Graham recounted telling the speaker, a Louisiana Republican. But, he said, the Senate would press ahead with its own bill, adding, “We are living on borrowed time.”
Senate Republicans have waited for weeks for their House colleagues to resolve their differences and agree to a budget blueprint that could unlock the party’s push to pass a vast fiscal package with only a simple majority vote. But House Republicans have remained divided over major issues, including how deeply to cut federal programs to pay for the bill, and have blown past several self-imposed deadlines.
Enter Mr. Graham, the fast-talking fourth-term Republican senator from South Carolina and the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
A loyal Trump ally who has long relished the opportunity to be in the middle of the action, Mr. Graham has made it clear in recent days that he has no intention of waiting for the House. Instead, Mr. Graham has advanced a budget plan that his committee is set to take up on Wednesday that would increase spending for the military and border security measures. He has promised that another bill extending the 2017 tax cuts will come later.
“To the American people: If you’d like to finish the wall, we need more money to do it,” Mr. Graham, who is fond of a snappy turn of phrase, said on Tuesday. “If you believe that President Trump is right to track down and deport criminal aliens and clean up the mess that’s been created over the last four years, we need more ICE agents.”
His move has crystallized a strategic clash between the Senate and the House that could have major consequences for the president’s agenda. In the House, G.O.P. leaders who have a razor-thin majority favor loading up a single bill with all of Mr. Trump’s policies, the better to pressure Republicans to put aside their reservations and vote for it. Mr. Johnson has said that the House would not take up the Senate’s narrower budget blueprint, telling reporters it would be a “nonstarter.”
Senate leaders have insisted on moving their own product anyway, reflecting both an urgency to deliver Mr. Trump an early political win on the border and deep skepticism that the notoriously fractious House G.O.P. conference will be able to quickly put together legislation that can pass.
“We have a sense of urgency in the Senate to move forward now,” Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 2 Republican, said in a brief interview. “If the House can do the whole thing now, great. It does seem that they’re not there yet.”
The blueprint that Mr. Graham has unveiled is fairly bare-bones. It would increase military spending by $150 billion. Spending on border security measures, including additional detention beds and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, would increase by $175 billion. It does not lay out specific spending cuts, but Mr. Graham has indicated that the legislation would be fully paid for, in part through new revenues from domestic drilling.
Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar, and Russell T. Vought, who leads the Office of Management and Budget, told Republican senators in a closed-door luncheon on Tuesday that they urgently needed that money to secure the border.
It is a markedly different approach from what G.O.P. leaders are toiling to put together in the House. With conservative hard-liners agitating for their bill to contain major spending cuts, top Republicans have worked to identify broadly palatable measures that would offset at least some of the cost of tax extensions and other fiscal policies.
“There is no animus or daylight between us,” Mr. Johnson said of Mr. Graham. “We all are trying to get to the same achievable objectives. And there’s just different ideas on how to get there. But I told my good friend Lindsey that I have to manage the House in the best and only way it can be managed, and that they’re going to have to give us a little more patience.”
It is a treacherous balancing act. A number of the provisions House Republicans want to include in their legislation cost trillions of dollars, including extending the 2017 tax cuts and eliminating taxes on tips. Republican lawmakers had considered putting forth a $4.7 trillion budget for cutting taxes, a huge sum that Representative Jason Smith, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said would not be enough to cut taxes further.
“In order to do a 10-year extension of just the expiring tax cuts is over $4.7 trillion,” he said. “It’s current tax policy. We’re not talking tax cuts; we’re talking current tax policy.”
To offset the costs of those measures, Republicans are eyeing politically fraught cuts to programs like Medicaid and food stamps, moves that could alienate the more centrist, politically vulnerable lawmakers in frontline districts.
The ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus called for $2.5 trillion in spending cuts on Tuesday, making the case in a statement that “we should not be negotiating with ourselves on how little to cut from Joe Biden’s insane spending levels.”
The House Budget Committee said it would unveil and pass its own budget blueprint on Thursday. Some Republicans remained skeptical that they would be able to reach an agreement by then.
“All I can tell my House colleagues: Whatever you need to do to get the one beautiful bill, do it. Do it now,” Mr. Graham said on Tuesday. “You have my blessing. You have my support. But if we can’t do it quickly, we need to go to Plan B.”
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